Paranoid about kids, parks

BY RADLEY BALKOThe Washington Post

Published: August 3, 2014

A couple of weeks ago, the Debra Harrell story made national headlines. Harrell was arrested in North Augusta, S.C., and charged with a felony for letting her 9-year-old daughter play at a park while Harrell worked a shift at a local McDonald’s. Now, it has happened again, in Port St. Lucie, where a mother was charged with child neglect after letting her son go to a park by himself. The mother told WPTV-TV that the officer who arrested her “kept going over that there’s pedophiles and this and that and basically the park wasn’t safe and he shouldn’t be there alone.”

There isn’t much evidence to support such fears. The most recent study on abducted kids was a 2002 study on children abducted in 1999. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the study found about 200,000 abductions that year. Of those, 58,200 were “non-family abductions.” But the vast majority of those kids were abducted by friends, acquaintances or boyfriends. Just 115 fit the “stranger swipes kid from public space” scenario that Harrell’s critics fear. Lenore Skenazy of Free-Range Kids points to another study that found that just 3 percent of homicides of children under age 5 committed between 1976 and 2005 were committed by strangers.

I couldn’t even begin to count the number of times I ventured out by myself on my bike as a kid. If my parents had been charged every time, they’d have been serving life sentences for repeat offenses by the time I turned 10.

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